What I read and why

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I intend Stevereads to be the ongoing autobiography of my reading - but I still love interaction! Readers are welcome to email me on any bookish subject under the sun, and if you want me to send you a copy of anything I discuss here, just say the word!

April 28th, 2016: by Steve Donoghue

As I’ve noted in the past here at Stevereads, I take a peculiar interest in the slight but often fascinating book-coverage you can find in the “lad mags” like Esquire or Men’s Journal or GQ. It’s always strange to me, the efforts the editors of these magazines (arrogant SOBs almost to a man) to find some way, any way, to make books feel interesting or relevant to their target demographic of swaggering, over-monied, pea-brained 20-something business drones. Magazines like Esquire and GQ know that demographic’s stupidity and biddability to the last decimal place, which is why these are some of the only major magazines still in circulation in the West that feature both embarrassing objectification of women and page after page of adds for cigarettes, cigars, and chewing tobacco.

Books are always going to be a strange element to add to such a brainless bro-centric mess, so I girded myself when I recently encountered a short feature in Esquire called “The New Books for Men” by Benjamin Percy, an egregiously overpraised young writer who here comes up with a list of books that have spoken to him in various ways as he’s ripened into the wise old guy he is today (according to Wikipedia, Percy is well shy of his 40th birthday). I went in hoping for one person’s account of what reading has meant to him, but Percy takes hardly any time before he’s made things a good deal more ponderous than that:

The older I get, the more I read to upset and challenge the man I’ve actually become. Reading is now less aspirational and more instructional. I cracked open Cormac McCarthy’s The Road at eactly the right time: the year my son almost died … The Road may take place in a postapocalyptic wasteland, but ultimately it’s a story about fathers and sons, about the terror of keeping your children safe from harm and teaching them to protect themselves in a world that sometimes seems bent on ruining them. The book helped me better understand and manage my own fears and sense of responsibility.

It should almost be needless to say that going to novels for “instructional” reasons is fundamentally wrong-headed. It reduces not only the novel but the novel’s readers. What, after all, according to Percy’s view here, happens to the readers who come to (sorry, “crack open,” like a brewski) The Road without having their young sons in the hospital? (Not even delving into the fact that The Road can somehow be enjoyed on a visceral level even by women – in the view Percy puts forward in this piece, women not only don’t read but can’t read) Percy goes through a list of books in a similar vein, each one named in conjunction with some nuts-and-bolts life lesson to which it can give operating instructions. Every work named (all popularly well-regarded; the list of titles alone pretty clearly hints that Percy doesn’t himself read books, ever, if he can help it) is given a narrow, one-topic point, a precise life-problem it can solve once its bro-reader picks it up, gropes it open, and begins mouthing its words to himself. And all of it is designed not as an end in itself but rather as one more notch on the money-clip of the World’s Most Interesting Man:

You look back on your life and the books you’ve read and you know you’re better off for having a large and varied and sometimes uncomfortable appetite for experience, for having lived widely, strenuously. Getting upset, leaving behind what’s familiar: That’s the point. The most interesting guy at the party isn’t the one who only surrounds himself with friends.

Whenever I come across a short piece like this in a lad-mag, I always feel a split reaction: on the one hand, I’m happy to see any mention of books in pages full of ads for $85,000 wrist watches and “recreational” products with a hundred-year record of causing lung cancer. But on the other hand, it’s irritating to see books and reading so smugly simplified – here’s how this Tolstoy guy helped me to play some catch with my dad – it’s the intellectual equivalent of strip-mining, and it’s depressing to think of all the young money-bros out there who’ll encounter Percy’s article and think reading William Styron or T. H. White is some kind of highbrow close equivalent to figuring out a sheet of IKEA instructions; “I’ve got a boss who’s absolutely obsessed with our quarterly reports … I better crack open this “Moby-Dick” book …”

But I’ll hold out a bit of stubborn hope anyway. Maybe next month’s issue of Outside …